Data Sets Used to Create IMPLAN Employment Data

IMPLAN employment includes both wage and salary employees and self-employed persons in a region. Full-time, part-time and seasonal workers are measured to create an estimate of annual average jobs.

BLS Covered Employment and Wages (CEW) data, BEA Regional Economic Accounts (REA) data, and County Business Patterns (CBP) data are used in conjunction to create IMPLAN data because no one dataset provides enough information to create a complete IMPLAN database.1 In general, CEW data provide the county level industry structure for IMPLAN, while CBP data are used to make non-disclosure adjustments to CEW data. REA data are used as controls for data not covered by CEW and proprietors.

Census County Business Patterns (CBP)

County Business Patterns (CBP) is a program run by the U.S. Department of Census. Employment numbers are a count of employees during the week of March 12. This is a point-in-time estimate and not an annual average.

Data at the 6-digit NAICS level of detail include: total number of establishments, total first quarter employment, first quarter current year and total annual payroll, and a breakdown of the number of firms for 12 different employment size classes. As might be expected with 6-digit level specification, there are significant disclosure problems. However, even when the sector data are non-disclosed, CBP provides the number of firms by employee size class. The CBP also excludes most government employees and farm sectors.

The CBP data give a picture of the industrial structure of a region and are used to adjust the CEW data for non-disclosure. There is a time lag, generally one year, between the current year and the most recent CBP data, but an industrial structure generally changes slowly over time. There are virtually no disclosure problems with the national-level CBP data.

BLS Covered Employment and Wages (CEW)

The CEW dataset is one of the most important datasets used in IMPLAN database development. These data provide the industry structure for the states and counties and the "ground truth" for IMPLAN data. There can be many differences between CBP and CEW, but in the end, if wage and salary employment doesn't exist in CEW, it won't exist in IMPLAN data sets. The data are provided by the U.S. Department of Labor as part of the Unemployment Insurance Covered Employment and Wages Program.

The CEW dataset provides annual average wage and salary establishment counts, employment counts, and payrolls by county at the 6-digit NAICS code level. These data are collected from a federal/state partnership program. State employment services departments, as part of the Unemployment Insurance Program, collect the data and pass it to the U.S. Department of Labor. As a result, only establishments that pay Unemployment Insurance are captured, hence the name "Covered Employment". Since these data only capture covered employees, the data set cannot capture self-employed persons, railway employment, religious organizations, military, elected officials, or any other establishments that have their own social insurance program and/or do not pay into the Unemployment Insurance program. Since most farm employment is self employment, CEW data misses much of the farm data. Farm data is supplemented with REA data.

BEA Regional Economic Accounts (REA)

The final set of employment and income information is the Bureau of Economic Analysis's (BEA) Regional Economic Accounts (REA) data. This dataset is the most inclusive available and provides information on sectors such as agriculture, construction, and railroads not directly available through CBP or CEW.

The REA data series also provides information on self-employment and proprietor income. The major drawback to these data is that they are only available at the 3-digit NAICS level for state and county income, and the 3-digit and 2-digit level for state and county employment. These data provide a means to estimate proprietor employment and income, allowing for completion of the IMPLAN labor income data. The information used in developing IMPLAN data in this section is the following:

2-digit County level total employment (wage and salary and self-employment) - CA25 tables

6-digit disclosed CEW state and county employment and income data aggregated to the 3-digit NAICS, BEA sectoring scheme (used to project the REA data to the current data year).

BEA employment and income data are also subject to non-disclosure rules; therefore, estimates are made for non-disclosed values.

Separating Counties from Independent Cities

Unlike the CEW and CBP data, which give information on all counties and independent cities in the U.S., the BEA has combined independent cities with their neighboring counties in their REA data series. In Virginia, there are currently 24 such combinations. In 1994 and earlier datasets, WI also had one of these combined regions. These regions require special processes to split into separate Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) counties.

The 3-digit CEW employment and income data are used to proportion the REA data into its component counties with alternative proxies being used where CEW data are unavailable or incomplete.

1 Other data sources are used to augment the above-listed sources for some specific sectors that are not fully covered by the above-listed sources or where more current data or data with more geographic or sectoral specificity are available.